Size matters. For proof, look no further than the cinematic graveyard of Saturday Night Live skits, those five-minute bits of comic perfection, stretched to their death at feature-length. Size matters, too, in Live From New York!, a portrait of SNL at 40, but in inverse: 82 minutes isn’t nearly long enough to consider every angle – or even many angles – of a cultural institution.
First-time filmmaker Bao Nguyen opens this documentary survey with “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” a strong song selection to score a montage of Saturday Night Live archival footage clocking its growth from avant-garde to establishment, and interspersed with images from matching eras (like Monica Lewinsky, Columbine, and the grubby, pre-Giuliani New York). You might read the opening as a statement of purpose – that Nguyen is most invested in the show as a monolith: the sum, not its parts. But what is Saturday Night Live without its parts, that rowdy mélange of personalities (and so many of them self-destructive)? When Gil Scott-Heron raps that “the revolution will not go better with Coke,” it rings like a homonymic call-out to all the brilliant, idiosyncratic, powder-nosed comics who turned TV comedy upside down and shook it for loose change. Most of them aren’t even named here.
But a lot of the cast, along with limited crew and a grab bag of other talking heads (Brian Williams, Adam Horovitz, Bill O’Reilly), do sit for the camera. They deliver insightful, clubby, frequently funny sound bites about SNL’s role as a cultural mirror and occasional conversation starter – a specific scope that excludes any exploration of the writers’ room, the grueling production cycle, how the talent is culled (or cut), the live band, and about a million other avenues of exploration. What the film does do is cycle through the departure and return of producer Lorne Michaels; two of the show’s longstanding problem spots: the lack of female and minority representation; the Andrew Dice Clay and Sinead O’Connor dustups; the political humor that’s been whetstoned in later years; the show’s role in the post-9/11 healing process; and its share-this surge in the Internet age. It’s not uninteresting stuff. It’s just not the whole story.
This article appears in June 12 • 2015.
